My Flickriver

Posts tagged ‘Rice’

Soy is one ingredient that I want to eat a lot more of. The only problem is, I don’t really know how to incorporate it into my diet. Plus, up until recently, soy, to me, basically equalled tofu, and I didn’t care much for tofu.

I’m learning, however, that soy really does not equal tofu. There is a lot more to it. You can consume soy in the form of beans, be them dried, sprouted, fresh (also known as edamame), or roasted. There’s also soy “milk”, soy flour, soy paste, tempeh, yuba and miso, to name a few. Now that’s a lot of options to choose from!

I’ve already switched from cow to soy milk quite a while ago. I never cared for cow’s milk anyway, so it was rather easy to change. It was just a matter of getting used to the taste. I started with vanilla; then I switched to unflavoured and more recently to unsweetened. Good. Now what else? How do I cook with soy? I need to find inspiration, and lots of it.

My mom recently gave me this SUPERB recipe book entirely dedicated to cooking with soy. The pictures in it are really beautiful and truly inspire me to try some (a lot) of the recipes. This is the first one I tried. Since I was extremely happy with how it turned out, you can expect to see a quite a few more in the upcoming weeks / months.

This was my first experience making fried rice with brown basmati rice. Since I’ve always used white in the past (I still have about a hundred pounds of the stuff left in my cupboard), I’m not extremely familiar with the brown version, but from what I’ve seen, I feel it tends to be stickier and mushier than the white. Since I like my grains to be well separated when making fried rice, I decided I would try cooking it like I would pasta, in a large quantity of boiling salted water and drain it once it reached the desired level of doneness.

This technique gave me somewhat good results, but I think it could’ve cooked for a few more minutes. I forgot that brown rice does have a longer cooking time than white, so the grains remained a little too crunchy for my taste. Guess I was just afraid to see my rice turn into a sticky mush, so I played it overly safe. Next time I will have to adjust consequently.

Other than that, I was fairly happy with this dish. Mind you, I was in the mood for a very dominant ginger taste and loads of green peas, so feel free to add less if you’re not that big a fan…

Ingredients(serves 1)

½ cup brown basmati rice

1 green onion, chopped (save a few pieces to garnish)

2 tbsp fresh ginger, chopped

3 button mushrooms, sliced

8-10 tail-on cooked cold shrimp (size 31-40)

1 cup frozen green peas

1 tbsp cooked wild rice (totally optional, I already had some in the fridge)

1 tsp sesame oil

1 tsp rice vinegar

½ tsp sambal oelek

White and Black toasted sesame seeds, for garnish

Ingredients

Cook brown rice in lots of salted boiling water until desired level of doneness. Drain and rinse under cold water.

Coat a non-stick pan with cooking spray and heat over medium heat. Add ginger, green onions and mushrooms; season with salt and pepper and cook for 2-3 minutes, until the mushrooms start to turn brown. Add rice and cook for another 8-10 minutes, stirring often.

Lately, I’ve been having major cravings for anything cinnamon. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea. I often get really strong cravings like that. Funny thing is, for years, I didn’t really care for cinnamon at all. I would barely even add any to apple desserts that I would make, and god only knows that apples and cinnamon are a match made in heaven, especially in desserts! For some strange reason, it seems I now want to add cinnamon to just about anything. I find myself sprinkling the stuff on my cottage cheese, which I eat every day with various fruits… also sprinkled with cinnamon.